This edition of the Quarterly State Compliance Review looks at some legislation of interest to corporate lawyers that went into effect between May 1 and July 1, 2012, as well as some recent cases of interest. It includes two rulings from Delaware's courts, and decisions from California and New York on whether corporate officers may sue for wrongful termination.
With the proper tools, support from corporate management, a motivated audit team and a few guidelines, a privacy audit can be conducted using primarily internal resources and with little or no business disruption.
Pharmaceutical companies scored a major victory on June 18 when a divided U.S. Supreme Court held that the industry's sales representatives are not eligible for overtime pay.
The next stop for the Proposition 8 case is the Supreme Court.The order denying rehearing leaves in place the court's February 2-1 ruling striking down the ban on equal protection grounds. The majority said the voter-enacted initiative served no purpose other than 'to lessen the status and human dignity' of gays.
Legislation to allow online gambling in New Jersey continues to make progress, despite concerns over its constitutionality.
In United States v. Nosal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, en banc, held that the prohibition against "exceed[ing] authorized access" to a computer under the CFAA does not apply when an employee has been granted access to the company computer infrastructure but uses that access, against company policy and the obvious interests of the company, to copy valuable, confidential information in order to take business from the company. For various reasons, articulated well in the dissent by Judge Barry Silverman (joined by only one other judge), the Ninth Circuit is wrong.
As an update to our article in the June 2011 issue, this article highlights important case developments and new legal trends that have emerged with respect to the collection of state sales taxes by online retailers, as well as a general overview of online sales taxes and the constitutionality of click-through affiliate relationships.
Advocates for online health services have long argued that the health care-services and health care-products industries could significantly enhance its ability to deliver quality products and services to consumers by using e-commerce to improve access to, and the timeliness and accuracy of, information, delivery and purchasing pertaining to the health care-sector supply chain.
A recent trend in the human resources community is to ask prospective employees for usernames and passwords to social media sites to allow the hiring employer access to otherwise private information about an employment candidate's "online identity." e-Commerce companies, even though they are based on and operate through online activities, sometimes through social media, should carefully consider what principals and hiring parties in the firms may view as a natural inclination to examine an applicant's or an employee's social media postings and persona by demanding access to the sites.
Misclassifying employees as "independent contractors" may put employers in triple jeopardy. (See article infra by Rosanna Sattler.)
